The great gulph of Carpentaria had as yet no definite outline on our nautical charts. It was the imaginary tracing of an undulating line intended to denote the limits between land and water, without a promontory or an island, a bay, harbour or inlet that was defined by shape or designated by name. This blank line was drawn and copied by one chart-maker from another, without the least authority, and without the least reason to believe that any European had ever visited this wide and deeply indented gulph; and yet when visited, this imaginary line was found to approximate so nearly to its true form as ascertained by survey, as to leave little doubt that some European navigator must, at one time or other, have examined it; though his labours have been buried, as the labours of many thousands have been before and since his time, in the mouldy archives of a jealous or selfish governmentwhether Portugueze or Dutch must be matter of conjecture, though the latter is the more probable. Of this gulph we have now, however, a complete and laborious survey; at the conclusion of which Captain Flinders thus expresses himself.

Thus was the examination of the gulph of Carpentaria finished, after employing one hundred and five days in coasting along its shores, and exploring its bays and islands. The extent of the gulph in longitude, from Endeavour's strait to Cape Wilberforce, is 5 degrees and in latitude 7 degrees; and the circuit, including the numerous islands and the openings, is little less than 400 leagues. It will be remarked that the form of it, given in the old charts, is not very erroneous, which proves it to have been the result of a real examination; but as no particulars were known of the discovery of the south and western parts, not even the name of the author, though opinion ascribed it with reason to Tasman, so the chart was considered as little better than a representation of fairy land, and did not obtain the credit which it was now proved to have merited. Henceforward the gulph of Carpentaria will take its station amongst the conspicuous parts of the globe in a decided character.'-vol. ii. p. 228.

But if any doubts remained as to the visits of Europeans to the gulph of Carpentaria, Captain Flinders had indubitable proofs of its shores being the resort of some foreign navigators, which, from the broken jars, rafts, and remnants of bamboo lattice work, he concluded to be either Indians or Chinese. This conjecture was not weakened from finding, in another spot, more than an acre of mangroves recently cut down with the axe, the remains of a charcoal fire, palm leaves sewed together with cotton thread into the form of such hats as are worn by the Chinese, the remains of blue cotton trowsers and a wooden anchor with one fluke. The mystery was cleared up before he left the gulph. He fell in with, at the English Company's islands, six Malay proas from Macassar, commanded by a chief of the name of Pobassoo, who told him that

there

The

there were upon the coast of the gulph, in different divisions, sixty proas of the same kind under a commander in chief of the name of Salloo. These proas, it seemed, were fitted out by the Rajah of Boni; they were each about the burden of twenty-five tons, and carried each as many men; their object was a small marine animal, which they called trepang, known to us by the name of the seaslug, or sea-cucumber, to the Portugueze by that of biche de mer, and which is, we believe, a species of the actinia or holothuria, perhaps both. They obtain them by diving to the depth of from three to eight fathoms. When caught they are split, boiled, stretched upon slips of bamboo, dried in the sun, smoked, and then stowed in bags. One hundred thousand of these animals is the average cargo of each proa, producing, at Timor-laot, where the Chinese meet the proas to purchase them, from two to four thousand Spanish dollars, according as the trepang is of the grey or black species, the latter being accounted twice as valuable as the former. chief of these proas was disposed to be friendly and communicative; he stated that he had been twenty years concerned in this trade, during which he had had little communication with the natives; of whom he cautioned the English to beware: he had not the least knowledge of any Europeans having settled on any part of Terra Australis; he knew nothing of any vegetable produce of the country fit for the sustenance of man; fish and turtle being all they procured while on the coast. They had no charts nor instruments of any kind, excepting a small pocket compass, apparently of Dutch manufacture. Each proa had a month's water on board, which was contained in joints of bamboo; their provisions consisted of rice, cocoa-nuts, and dried fish, with a few fowls for the use of the captain. They were Mahomedans, and shuddered at the sight of hogs on board the Investigator, though they drank wine without any sort of repugnance.

It is not to be expected that a nautical survey can furnish many opportunities, to those employed on it, for acquiring accurate information respecting the state of a colony planted in the corner of a vast country like that of Terra Australis, much less of the country itself and its original inhabitants. No better criterion can be assumed of the difficulties that lie in the way, than the fact that we have now had possession, in the shape of a colony, for the last five and twenty years, of the best part of the coast, yet know very little more of the nature of the country, of its inhabitants, and other productions, than what was known in the first three years of the settlement. Of this colony, therefore, we are not to look to Mr. Flinders's book for information. Still it may be proper to notice a few of the products which characterize Australasia, the first of which in the order to be considered is mau. In this rank of beings, even the

Hottentot is superior to the original native of New South Wales, who may perhaps be justly placed in the lowest division of the scale of human kind. They are hideously ugly in their features; their noses flat, nostrils wide, eyes sunk in the head, overshadowed by thick black eyebrows, but moving rapidly like those of monkeys, mouth extravagantly wide, lips thick and prominent, hair black and clotted but not woolly, colour from jet black to bronze. Their stature is below the middle size, and their persons are ill made, their limbs small, and almost without muscle; owing perhaps to the extreme poverty and scarcity of their food-those on the coast living chiefly on fish, which the men take with spears, and the women with hook and line, sometimes with nets; those in the woods deriving their subsistence from grubs, ants and ants' eggs, fern-root, flowers of the Banksia, berries, and honey. These silvan satyrs are described as having remarkably long and lean arms and legs, which are supposed to be owing to the climbing of trees, which they ascend by making notches with a stone hatchet for placing the great toe, and in this way they will mount stems of trees seventy or eighty feet high.

To improve the native deformity of their persons, they thrust a bone through the cartilage of the nose, and stick with gum to their clotted hair the teeth of men or kangaroos, the jaw bones of fish, tails of dogs, feathers, &c.; they daub their bodies in a fantastical manner with red and white clay, and deform the skin with ugly scars. The women, as well as the men, were found in a state of perfect nudity. These, and their female children, are generally deprived of the two first joints of the little finger of the left hand; and the reason assigned is, that these joints might not be in the way of winding their fishing-lines over it.

They have no fixed habitation; their temporary hovels consist each of the bark of a single tree, bent in the middle, and just large enough to receive one person: some found on the coast were larger, in the shape of a bee-hive, in which a family huddled all together; but they had no furniture, no conveniencies, no comforts of any description. They make no provision for a future day.

Their minds indeed appear to be as brutal as their persons are hideous. They have not yet reached that point even in savage life which unites men into tribes or societies for mutual protection; their clans extend not beyond the family circle, of which the eldest is called by a name synonimous with that of father. They display not the least trace of religion; they pay neither respect nor adoration to any object or being, real or imaginary; hence they have no stimulus to a good action, nothing to deter from a bad one. One of those who accompanied Governor Phillip to England, being questioned as to the ideas of his countrymen respecting a future state,

and

and whence they originally proceeded, answered-from the clouds, to which they were to return in the shape of little children, and live upon little fishes.

The paucity of their numbers would not seem to be owing solely to poverty and scarcity of food. Families and relations are perpetually destroying each other either by stratagem or open combat. If one man seriously injure, but more especially if he put to death, any member of a neighbouring family, all the relations of the party aggrieved think it incumbent to put the offending party or any of his relations to death, unless he be willing to expiate the offence by standing exposed to as many as may think fit to hurl their spears at him. If he should be killed, or so severely wounded as to be carried off the field, or be fortunate enough to parry all their shafts so long as they think fit to throw at him, the of fence is expiated, and from that moment they are friends. The English settlers used to assemble to witness these unequal combats, and by so doing seemed to give countenance to a practice which ended frequently in the death of the person accused. When this species of retaliation is not resorted to, the revenge of the family. injured extends to every branch of the offending family, and persons on both sides, even to the children, are put to death whenever an opportunity offers. It is also stated to be the constant practice of women to destroy by compression the infants in the womb, to avoid the trouble of carrying them about; if a woman dies or is murdered while she has an infant at the breast, the living child is inhumanly thrown into the same hole with the mother, and covered with stones, of which the unnatural father throws the first. These barbarous customs cannot fail to thin their numbers. Towards their women they are savage and cruel in an uncommon degree. Scarcely a single female of the age of maturity was ever seen without her head full of scars, the marks of her husband's kindness. The very first act of courtship is to knock down the intended bride with a club, and drag her away from her friends, bleeding and senseless, to the woods.

With all these savage manners, and the extremities to which they are frequently driven to allay the cravings of hunger, there is not the slightest ground for supposing them addicted to the practice of eating one another, as the French admiral Dentrecasteaux fancied them to be, because his surgeon happened to mistake the bones of a kangaroo for those of a girl. We still doubt whether the fact of anthropophagism, for the mere love of human flesh as food, has ever been clearly made out, even by our worthy friend Dr. Langsdorff, who is thoroughly satisfied that all our ancestors had a strong propensity to taste one another.

Captain Flinders and Mr. Bass seem to think that the natives of

Van Dieman's land are sunk still lower in the stage of human existence than those in the neighbourhood of Port Jackson, for it was obvious they had no canoes, and the hacked trees shewed that their stone hatchets were very inferior to those used by the natives within the colony; however they saw but one man, and he is described as having a countenance more expressive of benignity and intelligence, than of that ferocity or stupidity which generally characterized the other natives.' To the northward, on the eastern coast of New South Wales, the natives are described as somewhat superior to the rest; they had belts round the waist and fillets about the head and upper part of the arm, formed of hair twisted and reticulated; they were associated together in greater numbers, and their huts were far superior in construction to the others. They had fishing nets large and well made; and this circumstance, in the opinion of Captain Flinders, would cause a characteristic difference between the manners and perhaps dispositions of these people, and of those who catch their fish with the spear. A net cannot be managed but by two or more persons who must from necessity associate; this in course of time must produce the feeling of human aid; the net too being too cumbersome to be dragged about would suggest the necessity of a permanent residence; and hence the inhabitants would construct a better kind of houses; change of place would also be less necessary, as the net gives a more certain and plentiful supply of fish. On the other hand, the native of Port Jacksou, who depends upon his single arm and his spear for his support, requires not the aid of society, and is indifferent about it; he prowls along the coast, a gloomy, solitary, unsettled being.

'An inhabitant of Port Jackson,' says Colonel Collins, is seldom seen in the populous town of Sydney, without his spear, his throwing stick, or his club. His spear is his defence against enemies; it is the weapon which he uses to punish aggression, and revenge insult. It is even the instrument with which he corrects his wife in the last extreme; for in their passion, or perhaps oftener in a fit of jealousy, they scruple not to inflict death. It is the plaything of children, and in the hands of persons of all ages. It is easy to perceive what effect this must have upon their minds. They become familiarized to wounds, blood and death; and repeatedly involved in skirmishes and dangers, the native fears not death in his own person, and is consequently careless of inflicting it on others.'

On the southern coast, for a space of 70 miles to the westward of Kangaroo island, neither smoke nor other marks of inhabitants had been seen, and it was pretty certain that if there were any, they had no boats or canoes of any kind, as the contiguous islands had every appearance of never having been trodden by the foot of man. Among other reasons for this conclusion, was the extraordinary

stupidity